it's true, but it's hard, you only need to click once on a clickbait video out of curiosity and you'll be flooded with garbage until you reset your whole youtube history. I switched to individious/piped and newpipe since for a more quiet youtube experience.

You need to be very aggressive against this, dislike and don't recommend every bit of garbage you see otherwise you will be flooded with it

Hum... Maybe you didn't notice all the frenezy, but you can't dislike something anymore.

I'm not a very active user, but I think there is no positive "don't show me stuff like this again" action you can do anymore.

The public dislike count was removed. Dislikes are still counted and presumably affect recommendation

You need to prune your suggestions by clicking the three-dot menu on the suggested item and "Don't recommend video". I started this last year and after a week my suggestions cleaned up and are absolutely relevant and high quality to my interests.

The like/dislike ratio is a universal indicator. Serious/boring channels are not immune to the side effects of its disappearance. It affects every one across the board. Here comes a 20 minutes video on Dynamic Programming and I have no idea what other people really thought of the teacher's ability to get the point across.